HAZEL glanced nervously at the clock. Only another half-hour or so and they should be here. A pretty, dark-haired woman of thirty-six, she tried to hide her irritation as best she could when well-meaning people described her as ‘petite’ and exclaimed that she looked far too young to be her claimed age of thirty-six, never mind the mother of an almost-nineteen-year-old daughter into the bargain.

But that was exactly what she was, and it was as the mother of that very pretty, intelligent and popular nineteen-year-old that she was fretting anxiously about the arrangements she had made for Katie’s first proper visit home since she had left for university at the end of the summer.

It had been all very well to gulp, hold her breath and exclaim as calmly as she could that there would be no problem when Katie had rung up three days ago and announced breezily that when she came home for the weekend she would not be alone, but would be bringing a friend with her. After all, she had had nineteen years in which to get used to the fact that Katie was an inveterate people collector, but what she hadn’t expected was for Katie to continue excitedly, ‘I know you’re going to like Silas, Ma. He’s a very special person and I can’t wait for the two of you to meet.’

Her heart had plummeted immediately Katie had finished speaking, and, although she had successfully managed to hide it from her daughter, she had been overwhelmed by a sharp sense of fear.

And yet Katie had had boyfriends before, of course; several of them in fact; gangly, sometimes spotty young men, who blushed and stammered, or adopted an unwittingly touching and amusing male machismo which sat very uncomfortably on their as yet still boyish shoulders. But this time it was different. This time … This time she felt all the apprehension and alarm of a mother who felt that her child was threatened in some way.

She had sensed just from the way Katie spoke his name that this Silas was important to her. Too important … She gave a tiny shiver, frowning unseeingly around her small sitting-room.

She could never really understand those women who claimed that their teenage daughters were their best friends. She felt far too great a sense of responsibility and awareness of life’s cruelties and un-kindnesses ever to relax her maternal vigilance enough to make that claim.

She hoped she wasn’t a possessive mother. All through Katie’s growing years she had worked hard at making sure that Katie never became distanced from her peers or from other adults, or suffered the kind of aloneness and isolation which she had suffered as a child.

The trouble was that Katie had been so vague about this Silas Jardine, and she had not liked to question her too deeply. All she knew about him was that Katie had met him at the university and that she was sure that he and her mother were going to get on like a house on fire. It sounded very ominous to Hazel. She had been all too maternally aware that, behind her insouciance and bright chatter, Katie was hiding something.

Biting her bottom lip, Hazel checked round the sitting-room again.

A warm fire burned in the grate, and logs were heaped up in the basket beside the fire, logs which had been supplied by Tom Rawlins from the farm, about whom Katie was always teasing her by describing him as her adoring swain.

It was true that she and Tom occasionally went out for a meal or to see a show. He was a widower with two grown-up children; she was … Well, she was the mother of an almost grown-up daughter and it was only natural that they should have things in common. But that was as far as any relationship between them went.

Fortunately Tom was far too gentlemanly to make the kind of sexual demands she so dreaded and detested receiving.

It had shocked her three years ago, when Katie had coolly announced that it was high time that her mother stopped behaving as though she ought to be punished and despised simply because she had given birth to an illegitimate child, and started feeling proud of herself instead for all that she had done for that child.

‘Ma, every time a man looks at you, you shrink visibly. You’re a very attractive woman. Everyone says so, and I for one certainly wouldn’t object if you decided to provide me with a stepfather, providing of course that I liked him.’

‘Well, for your information, I have no intentions of doing any such thing,’ Hazel had retaliated sharply.

‘Why not? You should think about it,’ Katie had told her smartly, adding critically, ‘Just look at you. As long as I can remember it’s just been you, and me, and of course Gramps. I know it must have been awful for you, losing Dad like that in such an awful accident and then finding out about me. But I don’t see why just because of that you’ve got to spend the rest of your life hiding away from men. You can’t get pregnant just by smiling at them, you know,’ she had added with typical teenage scorn. ‘You can’t want to spend the rest of your life alone. With Gramps gone …’

‘It’s all right,’ Hazel had told her shakily but drily. ‘If you’re worried about having a geriatric parent on your hands cramping your style, I assure you that you need not be.’

That had made Katie laugh and the subject had been dropped, but Katie had resurrected it with uncomfortable frequency as the time drew nearer for her to leave home and go to university.

‘You’re so young, Ma,’ she had expostulated more than once. ‘Men fancy you. I’ve seen the way they look at you, but you … Well, you behave like—like a shrinking virgin.’

When Hazel had flushed and protested, Katie had grimaced and added, ‘Look at yourself now and you’ll see what I mean. Anyone would think you were totally sexually inexperienced, like … like a nun or something.’

‘Katie,’ she had protested crossly, for once silencing her ebullient offspring, but later, alone in her bedroom, staring out of the window at the pretty Cheshire countryside which gave her so much inspiration for her work as an illustrator of children’s

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A Forbidden Loving

Penny Jordan

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE